**A** (0:02):
Next, we have our friend Sonny here who has had and still is part of aforementioned Cosmos world. I have. That's right.
**B** (0:19):
No way.
**A** (0:25):
So I've jokingly referred to myself in the last few days as being bi. Ethereal. And also along that line, I think we've had lots of etc curious people recently. Now, if I'm bi ethereal, I don't know what the hell you are because you have visited many parts of the world, haven't you? So what kind of different blockchain projects have you been part of? Been interested in? What kind of range have you traversed.
**B** (1:11):
In the last one year? I've spoken now at a bitcoin conference. A bitcoin cash conference on Ethereum. Ethereum Classic. Dogecoin. Dogecoin's the best one. Of course. Dogecoin.
**A** (1:24):
We have Doge Preacher here.
**B** (1:25):
Doge Preacher, Yes. And Chelsea Cosmos.
**A** (1:30):
Come up on stage. Both of you come up. So sorry.
**B** (1:37):
Cosmos. Polkadot Tezos. I'm going to a stellar conference for the first time next month. I don't know, I just love interoperability.
**A** (1:45):
Don't go to a ripple one.
**B** (1:47):
I've spoken of ripple ones.
**A** (1:48):
Okay. Don't go to a BSV one. For God's sake.
**B** (1:52):
I have not been to a BSV one. I have not been to a BSV one.
**A** (1:56):
So yeah, I'd just like to introduce here Chelsea and Alex, who are long time. Yes, long time. Vancouver crypto folk are sort of the heart and soul of Decontrol that many of you were perhaps at last night. And they were both basically the organizers of Dogecon, which happened here in Vancouver. And Sunny attended.
**C** (2:27):
People are so welcome.
**A** (2:28):
And who. Sonny, you know, Sunny attended. I gave one of the opening talks at. And yes, happening again this time next year. So if anyone would like to come back to this glorious city in 2020, June, we have a plan. Month summer solstice.
**C** (2:49):
Dogecon. Vancouver happens on the summer solstice every two years.
**B** (2:52):
Keeping crypto weird is kind of the overall memes.
**C** (2:56):
There will be a D and D game. Like it's gonna be. It's gonna be pretty intense. So there will be information in the next couple months when we have our nonprofits at ggm. But Sunny, your kind words about Dogepon on your thing gave us happy.
**B** (3:08):
Seriously.
**A** (3:09):
So Alex is Doge.
**B** (3:12):
And I do real weddings if you want to get married on the blockchain. I am an ordained minister. Yeah. Is it on the government weddings though? Only Blockchain.
**A** (3:21):
Love you, mom. Love you too.
**B** (3:23):
Love you too, man.
**A** (3:24):
Okay. So cool. You know, love, not hate.
**B** (3:30):
Thank you. All right. Hey guys. My name is Sunny. So I don't, you know, these are a bunch of like organizations that I kind of work with, you know, I'm primarily work mostly on Cosmos, but also do a bunch of other stuff in the space. I used to work at Consensus for a while. I like to troll a little bit and cause like create my own little fork projects. My most recent one was this project called Straight Edge. But you'll notice that I don't really have much to do with Ethereum Classic. There's nothing here that has anything to do with Ethereum Classic. Except maybe I consensus a little bit where I used to troll Joe Lubin about it a lot. But yeah, I mean, but for some reason I'm considered the Ethereum Classic guy in the Ethereum community, which I don't understand why. Mostly I just wear. Yeah, I basically just wear this T shirt a lot. And then people think I'm like associated with Ethereum Classic. But the extent of my association is. I'll tell you a little bit of my story with Ethereum Classic. So the bottom left logo is Blockchain at Berkeley, it's just Org I created Student Org I created at Berkeley. We do a lot of cool stuff. About two, no, three years ago now I was interning, so I was at a hackathon over the summer and I was a huge bitcoiner. That's all I knew. And I heard about this Ethereum thing and so I told my friend, hey, let's look into this thing. I heard you can build applications using it. And so we're like, ok, let's check it out. And so the first thing we do is we go on r Ethereum and we open the page and this is kind of what we see. So I found out about Ethereum during the Dao attack and so I opened up this page. So this is the search results, the searching Dao attack. But it looks something like this. And I was like, okay, I don't know what's going on. People are yelling about rollbacks and Dao attacks and something. So I'm like, okay, this community is crazy. I turned it off, didn't look at Ethereum again for like another nine months. Then at the IC3 event the following summer, I kind of started working on this thing called back then it's called Peace Relay. Now it's called Peace Bridge. It was sort of like an initial attempt to try to do an Ethereum Ethereum Classic bridge that you can send tokens over that. And also at that event at IC3, we had that famous the first parity multi sig bug where money was being stolen. And so what I did at that IC3 event was me and my friend Nate, we heard, we were with the Ethereum foundation at that event, and we heard that something was hacked, and so they went off and did their own thing to solve it. So me and Nate, we tried to reverse engineer the attack. So we did. We wrote a script to exploit it, and we don't know what we were doing. We were just like, all right, let's just write this script and we'll figure out what to do with it later. Turns out by the time we finished, we learned that the attacker was a white hat. And so we decided not to run it. And then later that evening, I realized, oh, wait, what about Ethereum Classic? So then Dexteran and I spent that entire night running the script on Ethereum Classic to make sure there was no vulnerable contracts to. Turns out there weren't. Anyways, okay, so now onto the main point of my talk. So I don't know where I saw this quote. I've been trying to find it for the last few. I saw this quote maybe a week or two ago. If anyone knows where this is from, let me know. But basically, what it was saying was a war on the scale of two years is won by economics. A war on the scale of 20 years is won by technology, and a war or a civilizational conflict on. On the scale of 200 years is won by ideology. And this may make sense for war, but I think with the Internet and the digital world, maybe we have to compress these timescales a little bit. So how about let's say a digital war or a meme war on the scale of two months is won by economics. A digital war on the scale of two years is won by technology, and a digital war on the scale of two decades is won by ideology. So obviously I buy the Ethereum Classic ideology, which is why after learning about the history of the DAO attack, I'm like, oh, okay, I really think that was the right way to do it. But clearly it's losing the war against Ethereum. And because at the end of the day, ideology, I believe, is just a way of inspiring people. But the Ethereum foundation clearly won the war in economics. They're just way better funded and have the resources to win that war. Now we're in stage two, and I think what we should be focused. We're on. The scale of this digital war has been going on for over Two years now and I think it's time to start focusing heavily on technology. And I think the Ethereum community is really destroying Ethereum Classic on this front. Just the tooling is way better. We're getting way better. I think in the last year we've gotten way better. We're finally caught up to the opcode with Atlantis. We have things like Ether Node which helps us get that user experience that Infura gave. There's more Metamask stuff. And so I think the next thing that we need to do though is Ethereum's big thing is this ETH 2.0 and this move towards scalability with sharding and then proof of stake. And so I think Ethereum Classic should be looking towards these things as well, but in a more conservative way. I mean, I'm not a huge fan of the current roadmap towards Eth 2.0 and I think this is something where Ethereum Classic has the opportunity to really step up and basically provide a better roadmap, a more conservative roadmap that might be able to help it win in this technological conflict. So before we talk about Ethelastic 2.0, I'll give a brief summary of how the progress towards Eth 2.0 for people who may not be familiar with it. So what we have here is basically phase one, which is this main chain proof of work, the current Ethereum chain, and then they create this thing called the beacon chain which provides proof of stake. There's nothing really on this beacon chain in phase one, but it's to get proof of stake going. Then in phase two, they start to add these shard chains where you can move tokens between these different shards or you can't move. Well, yeah, you have these different shards, the validators are validating these different shards, but there's still nothing on these shards yet. Finally, in phase three, which might be like years away, we start to provide an execution engine where we can actually start running an EVM or a webassembly system or some sort of execution framework on these shards. And finally in phase four, will we finally start to get some sort of cross chain, cross chain communication where you can actually send transactions and data between shards. And so essentially my big worry about this is this seems backwards to me. I think that what Ethereum really needs right now is the scalability. Oh wait, sorry. Really quick. One thing to note as well is there's this like the part that worries me the most is this one way staking. Like what happens in phase one is you have to Do a one way burn, which just seems crazy to me where you have to go ahead and burn your ETH and you'll get this new token called I'll call it Beacon Eth because it's not really like if you don't have the ability to convert back to normal eth. I'm hesitant to call it the same token. And so if you try to move it back, you're not allowed to and you have to burn32 ETH just to be able to participate in phase one, which is not a trivial amount of money. And so this is really worrisome for me. So I love Proof of stake. I've spent the last two and a half years of my life working on proof of Stake on Cosmos and stuff. And I think proof of Stake is definitely the future. But I think there are some open questions that still have yet to be resolved. It's still a very experimental technology. We, we don't know the decentralization aspect of it. We don't know how resistant it is to cartelization. What kind of barriers of entries are there compared to proof of work? The neutrality is one that I'm actually personally really interested in because I think there's an issue where proof of work is just seen as more neutral which makes it easier for people to want to develop on a proof of work platform than proof of stake because there's this inherent notion or feeling that people get that when they're developing on a proof of stake platform they're kind of like part of someone else's empire or something, while a proof of work system is just seen as more neutral. Side point when it comes to neutrality, what I would really like to see is Ethereum Classic and Ethereum Remove the need for ETH or etc as the native fee token. You should be able to pay fees in any token you want. But you know, that's a side point. We can get into that discussion another time. So yeah, but really all of these are things that I think are solvable but really at the end of the key, the biggest problem with Proof of Stake right now is it is highly experimental. And when it comes to Ethereum, I just do not feel comfortable Shifting a $30 billion network to this highly experimental technology. And I want to see a more conservative roadmap towards getting there. And so this is why I kind of want to see. And I think the real issue came about in the last one year where they decided to merge the Casper and the Sharding projects into one system. And so I think this kind of muddled a lot of the research that was going on where these really should be treated as two different problems, but because they kind of got merged, it kind of got very complex. So my personal belief is that I would prefer to see a more of a focus on the sharding aspect and the scalability and, and then proof of stake can come over time because. Yeah, and so why is sharding important? One, it's important from the scalability standpoint, but two, it's also important from what I call the maker dilemma. I can give a brief summary of what the maker dilemma is. I think having everything on one chain fundamentally creates a governance issue where and I think this is best exemplified by the Maker project or dot MakerDAO. So I think the relationship between Ethereum and MakerDAO is parasitic in both ways. Here's how it's parasitic in the Ethereum to Maker way. Basically, as dai, as a user of dai, you are only getting the security of mkr. Your operational base layer is secured by Ether, but your governance by the security of your token is actually secured by mkr. And as an attacker, if I wanted to break the system I wouldn't go attack eth, I would attack MKR because it's the cheaper coin market cap and it's easier to attack. So I'm getting the security of MKR but I'm paying for the security of ETH by requiring all my transaction fees are denominated in ETH and I'm paying the. You know, it just doesn't make sense. I'm overpaying for security. Now how is the parasitic in the other direction? What in the other direction what happens is, let's say that there's a contentious hard fork in Ethereum. Let's say it's because of progpow or parity decides to go get their ETH back or you know, one of many, many, many reasons when the Ethereum Ethereum classic hard fork happened there weren't enough large scale dapps to really have much of a say and it really came down to more community members and the Ethereum foundation and many other entities. But today I think the most important group of individuals who would decide which fork of Ethereum would be successful is not the Ethereum foundation but rather the Makerdao holders. Because when there is a fork and Rune Christiansen and all five of the other maker MKR holders decide that oh, we just don't want to, we want to stop running the oracles on one side of the fork, the die on that side of the fork just falls Apart because the the prices aren't correct or whatnot and the entire defi narrative on that side of the fork falls apart. And I think that by putting everything on one chain you basically give a lot of governance control to some entities on decisions that maybe they shouldn't have a say in. Like why should MKR token holders decide which fork, the one with the parity refund or without the parity refund should win? That just seems wrong to me. And so I think putting everything on one chain causes these weird governance capture situations. So that's my pitch of and I think sidechains and sharding help solve that in quite a bit of a way. You can watch some of my talks about Cosmos of why that works. But yeah, so let's go on to why my preferred progress for how to get towards ETC 2.0. So you know what I would like to see first is so today we have our proof of work Ethereum classic main chain. It has an EVM on it, you have smart contracts and I would like to see step one is let's work on side chains, these sidechains and let's focus them on being proof of stake. So you stake on the Ethereum Classic main chain and that gives you voting power on the sidechain and we can use a consensus protocol like Tendermint or Tendermint is the one I'm most familiar with but there's many other consensus protocols that could work as well and we allow people we focus on the two way bridge. I think that's like step one. I don't know why that in what right mind like that wouldn't be step one. We need the ability for people to basically move their etc back and forth from the side chains to the main chain then and assume that these are all EVMs we can use things like the POA networks, token bridge and whatnot. While if you don't want them to be EVMs if you want them to be a chain built with the Cosmos SDK or subparity substrate or Yellay going to show IBC because I got to do that a little bit. So Cosmos we have this protocol called IBC and so that's a really great protocol. It's a generalized side chain protocol that allows you to kind of talk to do token transfers and data transfers between chains that don't have to share the same framework. It doesn't have to be EVM to evm. It's supposed to be a really well designed general framework. But yeah so and yeah so you know I think really, instead of These sidechains being EVMs, I would really prefer them to be application specific blockchains. There's many reasons I prefer application specific blockchains. I think, you know, smart contracting should be used for contracting like, you know, just like what it sounds like. Things that are, you know, very specialized, need high customizability, short term use. But I think Dapps should be kind of be on their own application specific blockchains. It reduces the attack surface you get. You know, most of the bugs today are because of like weird edge cases in the evm. Well, if you could write your application specific blockchain in a native programming language like Go or Rust, you can actually reduce a lot of the attack surface. You get way more efficiency gains and you get to fine tune to optimize the for your application. So yeah, and you know, we can use, so we have these proof of stake sidechains connected to the Ethereum main chain. We already see this actually happening quite a bit on Ethereum already. We have many projects who are working on sidechains. But then I think the next step then is, you know, let's run this for a while. See, let's really test proof of stake. I think there's no reason to test proof of stake on the main chain. We can start testing proof of stake on these sidechains. We wait some time and if things work well, then we can remove the. I don't know if you can see, I had the little on the EVM thing. It's plugged in, let's remove that. So now let's stop the deployment of new contracts on the root chain. We say, okay, all the contracts that are already on the root chain, they can stay there. Things that are not, you have to move them off. If you want to deploy new contracts, you have to start deploying them onto the sidechains or shards. Waste some more time. We can say, okay, you know what, now we're really comfortable with the EVM on these sidechains. The contracts have been going really well. Now we can maybe start migrating stuff off and we provide a path for people to migrate their contracts off into the sidechains and shards. And now we can wait a long, long, long, long more time. And when we finally feel comfortable about it and we really believe that that proof of stake seems to work, then we can finally go ahead and switch the main chain into proof of stake. And I think this, for this, I'm thinking like a time frame of five to 10 years when we really get to, I think proof of stake needs to go through the same tribulations that Proof of Work went to to get to the belief that we have in it today. And so this is sort of my humble proposal for an ETC 2.0. And so. Yeah, thank you.
**A** (20:50):
So just to say we're only going to take two questions here because we're running a very long way behind.
**B** (20:54):
Sure. Any questions?
**A** (20:57):
Also, we're going to go straight through the break. We're just carrying straight on. Cool.
**B** (21:02):
Any questions? Yes, yes. Cosmos db. Sorry, what? Any relationship? Oh, to Cosmos db. No, not at all. Yeah, Cosmos DB is just so completely. It's a cool open source project, but yeah, there's no really good relationship there. Thank you. Anything else? Oh yeah. How much more performance do we get if we, if we say we exchange IDC for a new protocol that requires both sides to be evm, how much do things get better? I don't think that much. I don't think they actually improve that much. Largely because most of the systems today that assume EVM on both sides are kind of doing it over the smart contracting layer. So for example, the POA token bridge, right, that requires these off chain validators to send transactions onto the chain that basically say, like, okay, I witnessed this event happening on this other EVM chain. The idea of IBC is let's not do this at the smart contract layer. Let's build this into the base protocol of a chain. And so I think it would actually be more efficient because you don't have to run this stuff on the evm, which is relatively inefficient, than doing it at the base layer. Yeah, but the problem, the problem is you do lose out, obviously on, you know, you need to build this into the base layer and it's not as permissionless to add it in, but I think once we come up with good standards around IBC as a protocol, then it'll be easier to. Yeah.
**A** (22:45):
Thank you.
**B** (22:46):
Thank you so much.
**A** (22:47):
Cheers. Thank you. Sunny.